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5 of the best documentaries of 2009

That’s how Henry Kissinger described Daniel Ellsberg who bravely leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers which helped end the war in Vietnam. He’s also a brilliant speaker and analyst of military affairs and it’s worth checking out some interviews with him on YouTube.

The life of Norman Finkelstein illustrates the fate of academics in North America who dare to tell the truth. Chomsky warned Finkelstein that if he continued writing books exposing establishment myths on the Middle East, “You’re going to get in trouble because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you.” And that’s exactly what they did as this film shows.

Another excellent film by PBS outlining the role of people like Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin in dismantling legislation that led to the escalation of the fictitious derivatives and hedge funds that have crippled America.

A look at the dominance of right-wing media in the USA and its increase after the election of Obama. The director signed an agreement with Springsteen to use his “My Hometown” song in the film but at the last minute, Clearwater, who are the communications behemoth that own the airwaves in America, ordered her to remove it. She asked some musicians if they’d create a song for her film and they told her that if they did, Clearwater would ruin their careers by blocking them from the airwaves. So it’s clear who pull the strings in communication in America.